In many instances, passenger vehicles, such as aircraft, buses, trains, ships, and automobiles, include passenger seats with a wide assortment of personal electronic and entertainment options to encourage passengers to remain seated as much as possible during transport for safety, crew mobility, and to enable efficient cabin service. Some passenger seats may provide video and audio entertainment, including television, video games, internet access, and other on-board entertainment (“OBE”) or in-flight entertainment (“IFE”) components. Typically, these entertainment devices are mounted in the seat backs and/or arm rests of the passenger seats.
With the advent of personal electronic devices (“PEDs”), such as tablet computers, cell phones, smart phones, handheld video game systems, personal digital assistants, palmtop computers, DVD players, data or audio-video media players, monitors, e-reader devices, multi-media enabled devices, and other similar electronic devices, many passengers may prefer to use their own PEDs, rather than the OBE or IFE components that are mounted in the passenger seats.
In some cases, it may be desirable to provide a way for passengers to mount their own PEDs for hands-free viewing and use and/or to connect their PEDs to the OBE or IFE systems or other networks, so that they may use their own PEDs in lieu of the OBE or IFE components. In other cases, the user may not have his or her own PED, but may be more familiar with PEDs of a particular type than he or she is with the OBE or IFE components. Thus, it may be desirable to provide the passenger with a PED similar to his or her own. It may also be desirable to provide the functionality described below without substantially altering the appearance and cosmetic design of the associated passenger seats.